Sqrrl, a fin-tech startup that owns and operates an investment app, has raised $1 million in a pre-Series A round of funding from Equanimity Venture Fund, which counts emerging markets guru Mark Mobius as a member of its investment committee.

The company said that the newly raised capital will be used to pursue “aggressive growth and add to its product and tech prowess.” The startup also aims to invest in new-age technologies, especially machine learning and artificial intelligence, to sharpen its product recommendation and smoothen its on-boarding process.

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The app enables users to invest in high-performing mutual funds based on their investment needs, risks and goals. As part of the deal, Rajesh Sehgal of Equanimity Investments will join the board of Sqrrl. Rajesh Sehgal, managing partner of Equanimity Investments, said,

The Sqrrl team is working hard to reach out to the broader India with its very highly intuitive offering available in nine Indian languages.

The app was launched in March last year by Dhananjay Singh, Sanjeev Sharma and Samant Sikka. The company claims to have amassed more than 150,000 downloads across Android and iOS devices. The company said that more than 76% of Sqrrl’s users are under the age of 35.

Dhananjay Singh, co-founder of the company said,

We have made a good start by building a personalised recommendation engine using analytics and data science. Further, we plan to employ machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve the recommendation engine, customer experience and security.

Sqrrl was earlier incubated at JioGenNext, a startup accelerator program run by Reliance Jio and Microsoft Ventures.

She started at Venture Dreams as an intern and later graduated as a writer. She is a start-up enthusiast and likes to cover stories on startup fundings and acquisitions. Feel free to contact her at [email protected]